The present invention relates to spray cooling of slab ingots produced by continuous casting.
It is common practice to spray water onto the casting as it emerges from the bottom of an open ended mold, and spray is continued for some distance along the withdrawal path, particularly as the casting is veered from a vertical orientation when leaving the mold to a horizontal orientation for further processing. Spray-cooling in one form or another is described e.g. in German Pat. Nos. 2,053,947 and 2,208,928 and also in a Handbook by E. Hermann "Handbuch des Stranggiessens" , Aluminum-Verlag Dusseldorf, pages 188,189.
It was found, however, that particularly in the mold-near zones of the ingot or casting, steam is developed extensively so that a steam layer tends to isolate the casting from the spray water to some extent, and water rarely comes into direct contact with the surface to be cooled. The production and effect of that steam layer is also known as the Leiden frost phenonemnon.